On becoming an author - and where to find me now

Hello! I'm sorry if you've been visiting this blog and finding it rather quiet. 

Since I last wrote a post here, I've become an author: my first novel, Starling, was published by Fairlight Books in September 2022 and it's been wonderful (and terrifying sometimes, but mostly wonderful).

It was time to come out from under my bookshelf so I made myself a proper author's website and that's where you'll find me from now on.

I'm at sarahjanebutlerauthor.co.uk I hope you'll come and say hello.

Thank you for reading my under the bookshelf blogs!

How Dad killed the neighbours' hens by accident, and other missing stories

This has been a hard week. My beloved Dad has dementia, and last week he fell four times, once on the stairs. He quite suddenly stopped being able to walk across a room without three of us helping him.

I'll cut a long story short (that's what Dad always says, though he's never knowingly told any story the short way). Yesterday, we finally admitted we couldn't cope at home as a family any more. Dad has moved to a care home. 

I don't think anyone's happy. Relieved, because Dad is safe. And he's with people who are kind and look after him - he's been in this home before while Mum rested, so we're reassured he's with good people.

But Dad's suddenly not at home. In a home is not the same as at home. He's baffled, and so, I think, are all of us. The shape of our family has changed, geographically - Dad is semi-detached. We have to ask permission to visit (these are Covid times). We can't make his favourite meal if he's sad. We can't take a mug of tea out to the bench in the garden and watch the wind in the trees.

Today, I settled down to make Dad a photo album that he can share with his new carers, and that we can look at together. It has photos of all of us over the years and I hope it will help him know we're here, he's at the centre of our family, and we love him.

But the earliest photo I have is the one at the top of this piece - of me and my Dad, six weeks after I was born. And isn't that shocking? Dad was 32 then. He'd been a little boy, had his appendix ripped out (his brutal scar still shocks medics), lived in London through the war, made explosives in the family greenhouse and killed the neighbours' chickens, ridden a motorbike, worked in his Dad's building firm, climbed rocks and mountains, done his national service on Gibraltar in the tunnels, come home and trained as a civil engineer, worked in London's sewers, met Mum, gone to jazz clubs, married Mum ... And I have not one photo of any of this. It's as if I think Dad's life began the day I was born.

So, maybe it's displacement, a way for me to understand what has happened. But I'm going to sit down with Mum and start Dad's album where it should begin. We'll pull out all the oldest photos from their oldest albums, as if we're remembering for Dad what has slipped out of reach in his own mind. I know somewhere there's a photo of a very small Dad in a terrible home-knitted one-piece swim suit that sagged like an old sofa as soon as it got wet, and I'm looking forward to laughing about it with him very soon.

On the significance of putting on my purple cardigan

I have just put on my Writing Cardigan. I don't really have writing fetishes - I can write anywhere, any time. I like to have coffee, but it's not essential. In the past I've written daily while the potatoes or pasta boil for dinner. I've written a whole scene in a cafe in the half hour before an appointment with a funeral director. I've dictated dialogue into my phone in the middle of the woods. But I do love my Writing Cardigan. It's old, bobbly, purple and growing new holes every year, and it brings me great comfort and warmth on this slightly autumnal late August morning.

It tells me that I am settling in for the long haul, and that I'm not going to leave the house today.

It reminds me that I love writing, and inside my head is a good place to be, even if it's messy and tangled sometimes, and the work is difficult and I may have to try many, many different ways of writing some of this book to make it the best it can be. I'm happy here, and lucky to have my Purple Cardigan, and this work.

I put my Purple Cardigan on today because I'm deep into a big rewrite of my novel. I'm stripping out a major plot element that was right at the time, and now it isn't. The book's going to be massively better off without it

When I look at the manuscript on which I've marked all the changes to make, I'm fine. Every post-it marks a cut, a change, or a scene to write and it's a lot, but it's amazing that I have this chance to make my book even better, knowing that in a year it will be published, and I'm so glad to be separating out the wheat from the chaff.

If you've ever done that for real - separating wheat from its chaff - you'll know that it's really satisfying. It's also ridiculously time consuming if you do it grain by grain, by hand, which is what I'm doing in my novel right now.

But I'm writing every day - from breakfast till lunch - and that's amazing after so many years of cramming it into the edges of my life.

Putting on my Purple Cardigan is a signifier to myself that I'm lucky, and deeply happy to be taking the time I need to do this work.

Medway: how did I not know about the estuary?

How have I never seen the Medway estuary before? 

I live near the upper river where the banks are a single-span bridge apart. Sometimes I paddle further downstream under the medieval arches of East Farleigh and Teston. The river can be wild here, uncontrollable, but I can always see the other side.

For most people it's easy to ignore the river up here unless you live in a flooding place. The catchment is vast and invisible but if you track the narrow valleys of the high Weald you can see how every one carries a stream that brings its water to the sea.

I've been following one of them for over a year now, and finally, a week ago, I reached the estuary. It was a revelation. 

I made a seven-day journey to get there and on the third day I escaped the traffic roar of the Medway towns to drop down to the Strand in Gillingham.

There were benches looking out, people sitting in ones and twos. Children paddling in the shallows. Black-headed gulls squawking and diving. A lone tender puttering out to a boat moored in the deeper water. A small island hid the far side but I could see cranes, crate-shaped buildings, industrial chimneys.

I sat for hours looking out over the mudflats and the water, simply enjoying the vastness of the light and the space.

How strange that this water begins as small, earthy streams in our hilly fields.

Strange too, to be looking out over somewhere that is so out of reach to me, unless I grow wings, or float.

I've found a place I think I love (even in the pouring rain) and that I want to get to know better. I'll certainly be back.

More about my Slow Medway project. 

Starling's on her way

I am the happiest writer. Today I signed a publishing agreement with the lovely people at Fairlight Books to publish my first novel, Starling, in 2022. 

I'm utterly amazed and delighted. Way back in December 2013 I started work on Starling with a picture in my mind of a formidable woman living off-grid. Mar is right-thinking, radical, fierce and determined. She's awesome in every sense of the word and I was a bit scared of her. Still am, if I'm honest. What would it be like to be her daughter, I wondered? Starling was born, always on the move, always watching Mar, always ready to run.

Nineteen years later, when the novel opens, Starling and Mar are holed up in a wood in their van, out of petrol, money and friends. Then Mar simply leaves. Starling can skin a rabbit, make nettle stew, fell a tree, but is it enough to survive - to live - when she's alone in a world she's learned to distrust and despise?

I love my characters and am so happy I'm going to spend the next six months immersed in their story, working with the Fairlight team to finish the novel I first dreamed of writing over seven years ago. (This is my bulging and battered notebook, full of the ideas that fed Starling.) 

It's been quite a month. I've tidied away all my copywriting files and cleared my diary. With the Arts Council grant supporting my Slow Medway project for the next year and Fairlight's commitment to Starling, I am going to write full time from next week. As I said, I am one very happy writer.

Slow Medway: finding the river

This, though I'd be amazed if you can tell, is a sketch of the patterns on the surface of the River Medway where the water surges fast just below the weir at Chafford and splits around a small grassy island. It makes so many different shapes and movements in one short stretch of water - I was glad I'd forgotten my phone because it made me really look at what the water was doing. Though I'd no idea what was happening beneath the surface - I was tempted for a moment to jump in and feel it for myself.

I made the sketch last Sunday, huddled against a pillbox out of a searingly bitter wind, in celebration of something truly amazing.

I've been given an Arts Council grant to write a book. I still can't quite believe it. My book's about the River Medway, my slow journey down it from my home to the sea, how my life has been touched by the river ever since I was a baby, and how I'm still not sure whether I have any right to lay claim to it. 

I've been thinking about memory, place, identity and time for a while now. My Dad was the River Engineer, but his memory has flowed away, leaving only faint marks where once he had such deep knowledge and love for the river. 

I've lived near the river for much of my life - sometimes on its banks, sometimes just over the hill. I'm aware of it, always checking its level when I drive over a bridge, noticing the saturation of the soil, swimming in it every summer, paddling up and down it all my adult life, almost drowning in it one January, finding my deepest calm when I slip into its olive, silty waters.

And yet. I'm never sure what the river means to me. I've never been sure if I belong. It was my Dad who was the engineer who had to manage the horrific floods of 1968. My husband is the elite canoeist. Others know far more than I do about the river's ecology. Everywhere I go there are Keep Out signs.

What does it actually mean, to feel you belong somewhere? How would I know if I belong? Does anyone? Can we belong to a place?

I've been very slowly travelling down the Medway for the past year, starting from the cattle pond in the field over the road. It's the source of a tiny tributary and it took me a long time to walk the handful of miles to the main river. We were all locked down, and my ME was bad. I'd walk a mile at a time, then come home to rest.

And once I recovered, I was back to work so my Medway journey had to fit into the gaps in my life, as writing always has. But with one email from the Arts Council, I'm liberated. I'm going to spend the next year exploring the river from my tiny tributary to the estuary. (That's my tributary below, turning fast into a bigger stream.) I'll return to places I think I know well, and on out to the tidal reaches and marshes that feel as exotic as anywhere I've ever been. I'll talk and listen to people whose lives are deeply connected to the river. And I'll wander, and wonder, about rivers and people, time and memory.

Slow water: on writing, swimming and time

This year the world slowed down around me, and I slowed too: my body told me it was time to stay close to home, and by mid-summer I was ill enough that walking half a mile was plenty.

But I was looking far beyond the small fields I could wander in. A piece of luck linked me with the artist Ardyn Halter, 3000 miles away in Israel. Together we were asked to explore the idea of A Common Place,  alongside writers and artists from across the world, brought together by the Eames Gallery and 26.

Our pairings were random - our names literally pulled from two hats and called out over Zoom in late June as the heat rose outside and the roads stayed empty. Though the world beyond our doors was closed we were making connections - and the next day Ardyn and I spoke for the first time.

Ardyn lives in Israel and I'm East Sussex, and we didn't know each other's work before that first conversation. How did we begin to find our common place? I'm not sure I remember exactly, but my notes are scattered across the page ... 

WATER

        read the water

strong waves

                            fear of below

different person each time

                                            LAYERS

coming home

what colour is feeling?

maps

memories

joy and chemistry

                        never entering same water twice

Some current had pulled our conversation to the water we share - my local, silty river Medway, and the Mediterranean where Ardyn swims daily before dawn. Since the beginning of this year I've been slowly travelling down the Medway towards the sea - swimming, walking, canoeing my way down the river I've known intimately since I was a baby, to a sea I barely know. That sea is connected to all sea, just as the land beneath my feet here, miles inland, flows into the river and on to the sea. This time of year - mid-December - I can clearly hear the water in the soil trickling into the tiny tributaries that gather over the fields and carry this morning's rain all the way to Israel, maybe, if it doesn't get distracted.

Water is slow, even when it moves fast - the rivers are filling and moving quickly after a week of rain here, but on every bend, there's an eddy, a nook where water pauses. Early sun lifts mist from the fields, carrying the water back into the air. Air, earth, water, all one.

My route down the river has slowed right down. I'm getting stronger and can walk a handful of miles now, but the world outside is closed again - I've almost reached Rochester, but it's out of bounds. So, like the water beneath my feet, I'm trickling slowly, wandering almost at random in the fields, up the hills and down the valleys where the streams gather.

But just look at the painting that Ardyn made, Sea Swim. Isn't it utterly gorgeous? It has all the emotion and sensation of the moment swimmer and sea come together. I love it.

And I have a poem, Flow, written after a summer of slow swimming in cool water on searingly hot days. My one constraint was that it must be 62 words exactly. It grew from rough notes made on a day after a walk along a tiny stream, thinking about tides, and from every swim I've ever slipped into:

A Common Place is at the Eames Fine Art Gallery until 24 December 2020.